Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters earned almost $20 million in its opening weekend, proving that I’ve completely misunderstood human nature my whole life. I haven’t felt this alienated from my fellow man since the last time someone mentioned any of today’s popular television or music or children’s names. Hansel/Gretel’s opening was three million better than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and while critics hated it (15 percent on RottenTomatoes), audiences… well, audiences thought it was just sort of meh too, giving it a B cinemascore. Hooray for a dearth of options!

Elsewhere, Parker landed in fifth with just $7 million, even worse than the last Stafe movie. It’s all part of my thesis, No One Actually Likes J-Lo. Below even that was Movie 43, with just $5 million.

In seventh place, star-studded comedy anthology Movie 43 tanked with just $5 million. That’s lower than practically any comparable titles, including spoof comedy Disaster Movie ($5.8 million). The audience skewed younger (59 percent under 25 years of age) and about even on gender (51 percent male), and they gave the movie an atrocious “D” CinemaScore. [BoxOfficeMojo]

Yep, even stoned teenagers hated it. It should be noted, though, that it only cost $6 million to make. Still, the savage reviews (5% on RT) were mean enough that the Farrelly Brothers (who produced and directed a segment) felt compelled to answer back::

To the critics: Movie 43 is not the end of the world. It’s just a $6-million movie where we tried to do something different. Now back off. P

Seeing that, I actually felt bad about not seeing Movie 43 and just assuming everyone was right instead of deciding for myself. After all, the type of movie film that critics get wrong most often are sophomoric comedies. Dick jokes are supposed to be vulgar and silly and kind of bad, but try getting a film critic who takes a picture of himself in a super-serious pose in front of all his Kurosawa books to admit liking a dick joke. Your Highness was everything a movie like that should be and three out of four critics still hated it.

But then I remembered why I hadn’t seen Movie 43. The distributor didn’t screen it for critics. Why is it always the filmmakers not screening their movies for critics you hear complaining about the critics? How dare critics not like something we didn’t think was good enough to show them! Don’t whine about no one respecting that you tried to do something different, when up until three seconds ago, you seemed pretty embarrassed about it yourselves. And it’s not about having to kiss critics’ asses and bribe them by letting them in for free, it’s the palpable lack of pride in the product that comes with hiding your movie until the very last minute. Trying to hide it makes it already suspect. It makes it seem like you don’t care about it. And if you don’t care about your movie, you can bet no one else will.

I fucked up and saw Movie 43 yesterday. It’s not a movie. I love sketch comedy. It wasn’t sketch comedy. It was a bunch of self-important assholes thinking they were doing something “different” and funny, but instead just coming off as clueless.

The related problem is that people are understandably gun shy about the Farrellys already. They should understand this after a string of shitty movies and actually try to put out a good comedy. This isn’t rocket science, when you’re in the hole already you have to work extra hard to get out of it.

As someone who actually saw it, (and liked it: genuinely creepy until the last 15 minutes ruin things) I would say the only way they could do sequels is renaming a completely different project. Like Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia. So yes, expect a Mama 2: Papa

MOVIE 43 basically had 2 good skits while the rest were just poorly executed bad ones. there was a weak narrative connecting each story together and a couple commercial that were ok. they all had funny concepts to work from but then just puttered out with the exception of a couple. i was really disappointed and i still haven’t figured out how all of these stars agreed to be in it.

Did you ever see “Loose Shoes?” That was a pretty terrible film in 1980, it was a whole bunch of “trailers” and “sketches” mashed together in one long film, had a few celebrity cameos in it like Bill Murray. BUT as bad as it was the only redeeming thing was the final musical sketch “Tight Pussy, Loose Shoes, and a Warm Place to Shit!” no joke! [www.youtube.com]

I saw Movie 43 & can tell you that apart from putting Oscar-winning people in the close vicinity of testicles, there was nothing new about it. It wasn’t a total waste, there were a few laughs, but it was pretty awful.

Dearth of options is right. But this should inspire future filmmakers: “Hey, this idea for a movie is not so good, and we can’t afford any real stars, and the budget is too low for what we want to accomplish, but it only has to be marginally better than the rest of the crap released in January!”

This is the same argument I used at Christmas. I ate twice as much as usual, and took a bunch of laxative, just so I could produce enough brand new shit for each of them, and all they did when they opened the boxes was complain.